My Newest App Made $2,000 in 28 Days by Copying My Competitors, and Now I Am Going to Copy Their Ads

My newest app made $2,000 in its first 28 days, 3000 downloads.

More than all my other apps combined, and I have been shipping apps for seven months.

I did not invent anything, I copied what my competitors were doing organically, put my app inside it, and it worked from day one.

Now I am doing the second half of the same idea, copying their ads, and for that I use Arcads, which just shipped an AI Agent that builds the whole campaign from a URL.

Here is how I got here.

What Copying Actually Means

For seven months I built first and looked for users after. The apps were fine, nobody ever saw them.

This time I promoted before writing one line of code, and not from a blank page.

I saw a type of video that was working and recreated it on a brand new account.

The next day it went viral.

New account, no audience, no history, which tells you the format was doing the work, not me.

The app at the top of your category already paid to find out which hook works.

That test is finished, you did not pay for it, and the answer is sitting on your feed in public.

I copy the pattern, the hook, the structure, the pacing.

Never their footage, never their creator, never their logo.

That is what got me to $2,000, and ads are the same move with money behind it.

Ads Are Where Everyone Quits

One video ad is a script, an actor, a shoot, an edit and captions.

Four days of work for one creative you have no idea will perform.

So most apps never run a single video ad, and the category leader stays the category leader.

The Arcads agent does that whole chain from a URL instead.

It reads the site, works out the products, researches the category, comes up with angles, and generates the video ads.

Everything below runs on a made up calorie tracker called ForkCast, and on Cal AI as the competitor, because I am not handing over my real app or the category it is in.

Swap your own app and your own category leader in as you read.

The Audience Line Is The Whole Campaign

Arcads asked me three things before it made anything.

Brand name, what I sell, who it is for.

That third one turned out to be the entire campaign, because every angle and every script comes out of it.

I did not answer it with a demographic.

I answered it with the person's history in the category.

→ Not this: people who want to lose weight, 18 to 35, on iPhone
→ This: people who already quit two or three calorie counters because logging by hand took too long

The first version makes ads about losing weight, which forty other apps already run.

The second makes ads about quitting, which nobody is making.

Then I Stopped Letting It Invent

Left alone Arcads writes you a new ad, and the one it wrote was fine.

Fine is what everybody gets.

I did not want a new ad, I wanted the one already winning in my category, so I went to Cal AI, the leader in that category.

They have dozens of them running right now, I picked one and told it to rebuild that one shot for shot.

Cal AI is doing around $1M a month, so that ad is not somebody's creative idea, it is the thing currently paying for that number.

Somebody already spent real money finding out that this exact order of shots makes people install a calorie tracker.

They ran the tests, they burned the budget, they threw away every version that did not work.

What is left is the one that survived, and it is sitting on your feed where anyone can watch it as many times as they want.

Starting from a blank page means running all of that again, with your money, to arrive somewhere probably worse.

The order is the asset.

The actor, the footage and the edit are replaceable, which is the entire reason this works at all.

So those three are the only things I let it change.

And This Is How It Turned Out

I did not film anything, I did not write a script, and I do not have a website for this app because the app does not exist.

It took the time it took me to make coffee.

Every hour you spend inventing an ad from nothing is an hour spent competing against a version that already beat the market.

Originality in advertising is not a virtue.

It is an untested guess that you are paying to run.

And it is not one video.

Arcads runs the same script with three different actors, a 1:1 and a 4:5 so it fits feed placements, a new hook for the eating out moment, another for the first missed day, another for the weekend.

That is a month of creative testing out of one subscription, and testing is the only part of this that has ever found a winner.

Nobody picks the winning ad.

You find it by running ten.

What I Am Doing Next

Not on X, by the way.

TikTok and Instagram, that is where an app in this category gets found, and the same format will do thousands of views on one upload and three hundred on the next.

That happens to me every week.

Your account is not dead, you are early in the sample.

Everything above ran on an app that does not exist.

The real one is my new app, the one doing $2,000, and that is where this goes next.

I am running the same thing on it this week, a batch of creatives out of Arcads, straight to TikTok and Instagram, and then money behind whichever one goes.

Organic proved the format works. Ads are how I find out how far it scales.

I will post what comes out.

Go doomscroll my account, everything I test ends up there first.